David Hogg was shaking his head the moment Rick Santorum’s face appeared on screen.
“How about kids instead of looking to someone else to solve their problem,” the former Republican senator and current CNN contributor said Sunday on State of the Union, “do something about maybe taking CPR classes or trying to deal with situations that when there is a violent shooter that you can actually respond to that?”
Asked to respond to those comments by CNN’s Alisyn Camerota on Monday’s New Day, Hogg, and his sister Lauren, who both survived the mass shooting in Parkland, Florida last month, seemed frankly horrified.
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“I just think it’s completely absurd that he’s even thinking about teaching us CPR when with we’re having gun violence all across America and even in our schools,” Lauren Hogg said. “The fact that he’s saying CPR when my friends are dying on my floor and nothing is being done about it is just horrible. I think he’s just using it as a distraction to get their attention away from guns.”
David Hogg added that while he supports programs that provide basic first aid training, he also had a simple message for Santorum: “At the end of the day, if you take a bullet from an AR-15 to the head, no amount of CPR is going to save you, because you’re dead.”
Earlier in the segment, David Hogg refused to pull any punches on Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), who has become a major target of the movement to prevent gun violence, as evidenced by the many signs bearing his face at Saturday’s March for Our Lives rallies.
When Camerota suggested that perhaps the students’ ire toward Rubio was “misplaced” and “unnecessarily provocative,” Hogg said, “I don’t think it’s provocative enough.”
“So long as he is being paid by the NRA, he is not going to work to fix anything that is going to be concrete change,” Hogg said of Rubio. “He’s going to make laws that get him re-elected but actually don’t have any major effect.”
